The present invention relates to a system for opening bundles of flat mail and particularly to a system for cutting bands and/or overwrap material of bundles of flat mail, including articles such as magazines, catalogs, brochures, and the like, to allow easy removal of such articles from the packaging.
Publishers and printers typically provide packages of preaddressed magazines, catalogs, brochures and other bound mail items to a postal distribution center for opening, subsequent sorting, and subsequent delivery to a local post office. These packages are generally referred to as bundles and are typically grouped according to zip codes. Such bundles range greatly in size, including height, width, and length depending upon the type of magazine and the number of magazines/catalogs destined for a particular zip code. Such bundles may have a film wrapping material, orthogonal circumscribing bands, or both for packaging. The banding may be inside or outside of the film. The bundles may include sequential addressees on a given street(s) which, when the bundles are opened, are subsequently sorted and delivered to a mail carrier for sequential delivery to the addressees along the carrier's route.
The unbundling or unbundling step has typically been accomplished manually by an operator cutting the bands and the overwrap with a knife, removing the remnants of the wrap and/or bands, aligning the spines of the articles, and subsequently placing the stack of articles into a mobile cart or conveyable “bucket” for subsequent machine reader identification and sorting according to address. This manual unbundling process is both time consuming, expensive, and prone to causing personal injuries in the form of carpel tunnel syndrome, cuts, and, in some cases, results in damage to the articles due to the manual cutting of the overwrap. U.S. Pat. No. 7,174,695 describes an automated process for unbundling such bundles of flat mail and represents a significant advancement in the mail sorting and delivery process. Nonetheless, there remains a need for a fast, less expensive and at least partially automated system for unbundling flat mail.